


move through fire (even iron can start again)

by closingdoors



Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: (sorta) - Freeform, (this is pepper finding out abt the poisoning disguised as a character study), Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Palladium Poisoning, Pre-Relationship, So sue me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-30 15:51:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15100037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/closingdoors/pseuds/closingdoors
Summary: They don't touch, and they don't speak about this thing between them, so neither of them are hurt. These are the rules he goes by.That is, until palladium keeps him alive long enough to kill him.





	move through fire (even iron can start again)

**Author's Note:**

> "When you make a mistake with metal, you can melt things down and start fresh. It is irritating, and it costs in time and soot and sweat, but it can be done. There is a comfort in iron, knowing that a fresh start is always possible. But a city is not a sword. It is a living thing, and living things defy simple fixing. Roots cannot be reforged. They scar, and broken branches must be cut and sealed with tar. And this makes me angry, as it always has, and my anger has no place to go."

During Afghanistan, he has a lot of time to think. His hands are familiar with how to forge iron into a weapon. It is routine to have oil covering his hands, a sheen of sweat on his brow, for the callouses on his fingers to harden. So, often, he finds his predicament melting away from in front of him. He occupies the space in his head. The part that isn't intent on mass destruction, that isn't constantly designing the biggest explosion just to be noticed. It's a part of his mind he doesn't frequent often. Mostly because it hurts. Because then he thinks of his father and how even now he would be disappointed in him. How his mother would be worried. How neither of these things should matter because they're six feet under the ground, and perhaps he will be too if he doesn't escape the vicious circle of _I have to_ _prove Howard wrong_ leading to  _I only ever prove him right._

So he thinks, and after pushing his parents out of his mind, he finds himself thinking about Pepper Potts. Which, really, shouldn't surprise him. Though part of his mind tells him not to, that perhaps he should focus on Rhodey instead, wonder if he survived the onslaught while members of his unit fell. But then he thinks of freckles, of the few glimpses he's caught of her collarbones, and she's all he can focus on. Pepper and her kind heart. Pepper and her gentle hands.

He jerks awake one night when he thinks he hears her voice.  _Tony!_

Yinsen sleeps fitfully. His eyes always flutter beneath his lids. He jerks every now and then. Tony sits upright, manoeuvring around the wires connecting to the electromagnet in his chest, and studies him. Yinsen has mentioned wanting to escape so that he can see his family again. He finds himself wondering if that's what this feeling inside his chest is. If Yinsen has a Pepper. And if so, what that makes Pepper to Tony. He's not an idiot. He's a genius, actually. Though matters of the heart have often eluded him. From the day he met Pepper Potts, the day he hired her on the spot, he has been attracted to her. A kind of simmering attraction that's different from what he usually feels. The other is a burst of adrenaline. A need to tear clothes and have skin meet skin. While that's a part of the simmering, he knows that if he touched Pepper, it would only hurt him. Because the burst of adrenaline wears off after one night and he doesn't feel a thing when the women leave the next morning. He's usually down in his workshop already, listening to rock music and letting his hands work on a new weapon. But this - this simmering. It's not the kind of thing that disperses like adrenaline. It's the kind which has coalesced into his very being. She simply has to walk into a room and that's it. His body sighs. Like  _yes, here it is, home._ But he knows only how to work in iron. He cannot manipulate her like he would a sheet of metal. He cannot bend her into shape. She is too strong for that. He would only ruin things and she would leave.

So he cannot touch her. He'll never touch her. But he thinks about her. 

Dear god, does he think about her.

 

*

 

When he's rescued, when they patch him up, he finds himself asking about Pepper. Watching the way the medic's hands work - careful and clinical, not at all like how she handles him after she finds him unconscious in a puddle of his vomit after a party - he babbles to Rhodey about how he needs to know she's okay. That she hasn't left the company in the months he's been gone. There's an all too knowing look in Rhodey's eyes. Frankly, he doesn't care any more. He thinks perhaps the only one who doesn't know he's in love with Pepper Potts is the woman herself. Admitting it to himself leaves a sweet taste in his mouth and a dozen questions about her, though Rhodey tells him that she's fine, that she does still work for Stark Industries, and that she's waiting for him on the other end of the plane journey.

 

*

 

The thing about it is - well, as long as they don't touch, then this thing between them is just unspoken. It's been that way for years now. As much as he knows he's undeserving of her, he's not blind. He knows that she feels something for him, too, something more than professional courtesy and physical attraction. Though it may not be as intense, as fiery, as what he feels for her. 

When he gets the car, and Happy winds up the barrier between him and them, he tries to think of the right words to say. Now that they've moved past the banter, now that he's demanded his press conference and cheeseburger, he's not sure where to start. Because he knows that he cannot touch her. It's his rule. So he has to find the words - the words to make her see that she's half the reason he's alive. She may not have built the suit, but there's no one else he wanted to fly home to. And she may not support his decision to fight the terrorists who caught him - in fact, he's certain she'll protests if she finds out about his plans - but she's the one that he's fighting to protect. As long as threat is neutralised, she is safe. Because if they got to him, they could get to her too.

He's silent too long. They've already pulled out of the airport. There's no space left to say anything now.

But she moves her hand, just slightly, so that her pinky finger hooks over his. It's a breach of his rules. He doesn't move his hand away. Instead he looks at her because, yes, looking at her feels like looking directly at the sun, but it's what he's allowed to do. Her eyes are glazed over with tears. But she gives him a small smile and ducks her head, shielding herself from his gaze with the few slips of hair that are free of her bun. He keeps watching her anyway.

 

*

 

Sometimes, it feels like he's back in college, or even earlier, back in boarding school. When he took too many classes because otherwise the world around him was just too  _slow._ He was constantly moving fast, on edge, like an overly-caffeinated freshman. Admittedly, he'd had cocaine in his system at the time. This is an angrier kind of feeling, though. More aggressive. He improves and improves and improves the suit until it's perfect. Until it's capable of blowing up a small town and saving its inhabitants. Yet even when he's flying home, there's still a deep sense of unfulfillment.  _More,_ his brain urges,  _more._

The need only ever quietens when he's with Pepper.

She waits until he's free of the suit. Even though she's horrified, she's already armed with antiseptic and bandages. She washes his torso with warm water, and now they're really breaching his rules, but he doesn't stop her because it's the only time in his life when being slow has ever felt right. Like he's actually moving at the same pace as the rest of the world. Her hands are gentle when she presses them against his jaw, angling it away and studying his neck for bruises and contusions. She soothes the sting of the antiseptic against his wounds with a thumb pressed to his chin, her fingers resting just below his left eye. There's things she's biting her tongue at, he knows, as she wraps his ribs. Practical things, like how she's not a doctor, how he should go to hospital, that he has more than enough money to keep the doctors from telling the press about how he got the injuries. And, he likes to hope, that she's glad he's alive, that she couldn't live without him - but he realises that's just him. Pepper's more than capable of being without him. She moves away and the  _more, more, more_ feeling rises up again. For a moment he almost reaches out for her, just to silence it for a second longer.

 

*

 

Tony wakes to find her standing over him. Or, actually, crouching over him. He opens his mouth to ask her what happened, but she shushes him, and JARVIS releases him from the suit. He's flat on his back inside of it, feeling rather like a turtle who can't flip themselves the right way round, but her hands - clammy, he thinks idly - press to either side of his face so he doesn't move. There's a smudge of ash on her temple, dirt compressed on the front of her dress, and it comes back to him slowly as she assesses him for injuries. Obadiah, the reactor, him yelling for her to push the button while she returned with a  _you'll die!_

He shifts, just enough to see that the reactor in his chest is still glowing, before sighing with relief. The  _more, more, more_ is gone now. In fact, his brain is strangely silent, and not just because of Pepper. It takes him a long, pregnant pause to realise that his mind isn't silent. It's numb. Obadiah, his oldest confidant, his father's friend for christsake, sold his weapons to terrorists, hired them to kill him, and when that didn't work, copied his designs so that he could do the deed himself. There's a cold feeling brewing in his stomach. It overtakes him violently and he has just enough time to turn away from Pepper before he's vomiting on the floor.

Her hand rubs up and down his back. A slow soothing pattern. His mind kicks into overdrive, wondering who the hell he has left anymore. Sure, Obadiah had been his father's friend, but he'd always thought that through his mentoring they had formed a bond, something he had always been desperately searching for. Now it's broken. He needs to know. Why is Pepper still here? If he stopped paying her tomorrow, would he ever see her again? His mouth opens to ask, but he retches again, and one of her hands massages the back of his neck. He thinks perhaps the answer would break him so he lays there silently, her hands on his back, his head in his hands.

 

*

 

The palladium poisoning creeps up on him overnight. He wakes one morning to find a jigsaw pattern of purple veins surrounding his arc reactor. He has JARVIS scan him immediately, though he has a sinking feeling in his stomach about what it might be. JARVIS gently tells him that the outcome of the poisoning will be fatal. Together, or, well, by himself while talking out loud to JARVIS, he creates a little something that makes him look like less of a walking hospital patient while abating the nausea that he feels comes with it. It doesn't slow it down. Only masks it. He stares at his reflection for the rest of the day after that. Pepper tries to talk to him once, he feels her fingers touch his forehead briefly to take his temperature, but he still doesn't say a word. She returns with advil and green tea. He lets the tea go cold and dumps the advil in the trash after she leaves for home that day. How very cruel it is, he thinks, that he's found his purpose in life, just before it's due to end.

 

*

 

After he wrecks everything, he makes her an omelette. He tries to, anyway. At the end of his three-hour stint in the tiny plane canteen he's made exactly twenty-four omelettes, all as terrible as the other. One of the air hostesses offers to help him, her voice a little too low for his liking, and he politely declines while dropping an egg on his shoe. She begins to kneel down, as though to clean it, or - well. He doesn't stick around for long enough to find out. He plates what he's made and dashes out before anyone around them can get the wrong idea.

He's been breaking everything he knows recently just to feel something than mind-numbing  _this is all the life I have_ and now he's tired. Now, he just wants someone to know, someone to understand. No one has ever really understood him. There's always been that small sheet of miscommunication isolating him from the rest of the world. If he's going to die, he'd rather die knowing there was someone out there who got him entirely, and he knows just who he wants that person to be.

"What are you not telling me?" She asks him later, and he looks out of the plane window. 

They're somewhere over the south of France right now. If he wanted, he could have this plane turned around. Flown somewhere else exotic. Though, he guesses, Pepper would object, and that would make it kidnapping. Considering she's his CEO now, that could leave him without a job. Not that he's going to need one anymore. It's why he gave the company to her in the first place. He's the only person he trusts to keep it running. She has been for years now. She'll do a better job than him. A lot of things will be better without him, really, and it doesn't hurt anymore to admit it, though he'll fight to be the loudest one in the room until he takes that final breath.

"Tony?"

He turns back to her.

"I don't want to go home. At all," he confesses, though his brain is screaming  _what are you doing, you idiot, you don't speak about it,_ "let's cancel my birthday party and - uh, we're in Europe. Let's go to Venice. Cipriani. Remember? It's a great place to... to be healthy."

He's losing her, he can see it.

"I don't think this is the right time. We're in kind of a mess."

Oh, how little she realises.

"Yeah but maybe that's why it's the best time."

"I think as the CEO I need to show up."

"As CEO you are entitled to, uh, leave."

"A leave?"

"A company retreat - "

"A retreat during a time like this?" She echoes. Her voice is soft and he almost wishes she'd yell at him. 

He can't look at her.

"I'm just saying to recharge our batteries and figure it all out."

"Not everybody runs on batteries, Tony."

He looks up then. He has to. He has to pretend to smile and glance up to see her own smile. Hers is forced, too, and there's a tiredness clinging to her frame. Part of him almost gives up. What's the point in telling her, anyway? What does he expect from her really? To cry? To sob over his mortality? It's egotistical and foolish to think that she would. She's got enough on her plate. His life ending would just be another PR nightmare to deal with. There won't be any declarations of undying love. There won't be tears. He'll just be lumping another one of his problems onto her like he always has done. For once, he shouldn't be selfish. 

Pepper turns away from him then, studying the world through the window. A slice of the sunset casts itself across her skin, orange and warm, a similar hue to her freckles. He's always wondered how many she has. If the skin under her clothes is smothered in them or if there's just a few littered here and there. There are many questions he'll die without knowing the answer to, he realises. The majority of them relate to Pepper. He wonders how she tastes. How soft her lips are. If she's the kind of person that would laugh in bed with him, unlike all the women before who have been intent on putting on a performance. He wonders when the last time someone made her coffee, looked after her when she was sick, answered the phone for her when she was too tired. He wonders, if he'd been a better man, whether she would've let him do those things for her.

"Pepper."

She hums, not looking at him, and the amber light shines against her neck, in her hair. 

"I'm dying."

Her head whips around to face him immediately.

"What?"

"I'm dying," he repeats again, and this time it feels like someone has knocked the wind right out of him, because she doesn't tear up, and she doesn't look the slightest bit sad, she just frowns. 

"Have you been drinking?"

"Sober as the day I was born," he promises.

Pepper's mouth opens, but no words come out. Perhaps this is worse than her being confused. Pepper always has an answer for everything. She always has a retort for his jokes. A way around the problems he throws at her. Instead she sits and stares at him, and he struggles to breathe, which may be the poisoning more than anything, but he can believe it's a result of her, too.

"It's the palladium. It's poisoning me slowly. I've got maybe six months left in me. Less if I use the suit."

Pepper's eyes drop down to the reactor glowing through his t-shirt.

"Can you stop it?"

"No."

Her frown deepens.

"Can't you just - just replace it with another one?"

"It's the element keeping me alive, Pep," he says, tapping the metal. Her hand jerks from her knee and hangs in the space between them. He pretends not to notice. "Nothing else can. It's this for a couple months or it's kicking the bucket now with a bunch of metal in my heart."

"Don't say that," Pepper snaps.

"It's the truth."

"But - you - Tony, you're  _you._ You have a way out of everything. Even being held captive in Afghanistan," she tells him, laughing wetly. "Who else knows about this?"

Tony just gives her a small shrug. It's easier than admitting that he can barely get the words out. That dying scares him a whole lot more than he'd care to admit, because truthfully he's always considered himself halfway immortal. He survived years of abusing his body with alcohol and drugs. There had been nothing he'd feared because the threat had always seemed so far away. 

"Just me?" She asks wearily. She rubs a hand across her eyes. "God, Tony."

After, she begins to cry, and he finds himself stuck to his seat. Unable to do anything else but watch. She's silent when she cries. The tears roll down her cheeks and she doesn't wipe them away. She keeps her eyes covered with one hand, as though she's hidden that way, and he finds his throat getting clogged up. He doesn't remember the last time he cried. Maybe when he found out about his parent's death. Now he can feel it creeping up on him. And he realises this is what he'd been looking for. Not understanding. Not sympathy. But the knowledge that his death would affect someone. That he had turned himself around and become a decent man in this past year. That he meant something, to at least one person. To the person who mattered most.

Pepper drops the hand from her eyes. They're red, puffy, and she doesn't say a word when they meet his. Maybe there aren't words. Or maybe there's a lot of things they should be saying. Though he doesn't see the point. It's too late now, anyway. Confessing anything would only hurt because time is limited. He keeps his love for her tucked away, under the arc reactor, and he knows it'll stay there until that light goes out.

She slips her heels off and stands. She crosses the cabin slowly and stops when her knees bump against his. He finds himself reaching out to rest his hand on her hip. She places a knee between his and kneels into his space and he closes his eyes when he feels her press her lips in a kiss against his forehead, her hands cupping his jaw. Pepper's gone once he opens his eyes but the feel of her lips keeps his skin warm for hours after.

 

*

 

They don't talk about it. She goes back to being CEO and puts out his fires. He barely sees her, which, he thinks, should be the opposite reaction she should be having. Then again, he'd put himself in a racing car just to feel something other than fear, so who is he to judge?

One night, ten days after telling her, he wakes only because JARVIS has adjusted the lighting in the room. It slips from jet black to deep blue. He recognises the lighting setting as Pepper's. Once he's blinked the sleep out of his eyes he realises there's a form standing at the end of the bed. He props himself up on his elbows. Even though he mostly has shadows to work with, he knows it's her. He watches as she drops half a foot after taking her shoes off and then she stares at him. His eyes have adjusted to the light, enough that he can barely make out her eyes on his in the dark, when she moves again. In one swift movement, she's pulled her dress over her head, and he can do nothing but stare as she crawls onto the bed and climbs into his lap.

Her hands are gentle when they cup his cheeks. She's the one to lean in the for kiss, and while it's soft at first, it soon grows heated. He rests his hands on the small of her back, committing the feel of her skin to memory, while aching for the lights to be brighter. He wants to know what she looks like. He wants to remember this, everything about it, not just how it feels. But he can feel how jittery she is, even as his thumbs dip by her hipbones, so he doesn't say anything, because this is a terrible idea. This is a really, really stupid idea, but he's selfish enough that he doesn't want it to stop. So he lets her push him back down against the mattress, until her hair is a blanket on either side of his face, until their chests brush. One hand abandons his cheek to curl around his arc reactor, her pinky finger brushing the place where skin meets metal, and she pulls away from his kiss breathlessly. He thinks she's going to say something, but then she unclasps her bra and lets the straps slip down her arms, and he forgets what it is he wanted her to say anyway.

 

*

 

She's gone by the morning.

 

*

 

He spends a lot of time going over his will. The company has already been sorted - everything is in Pepper's name. But his personal items? He knows she wouldn't want them. So he organises things she way she used to organise things for him. He has the paperwork drawn up and signed. In the event of his death, his house and belongings are to be auctioned off, and the money is to be donated for charity. Pepper Potts doesn't have to have a damn thing to do with the proceedings. He likes to think that maybe she'll be too grief-stricken to try doing so, but he knows her better than that.

 

*

 

One morning, Natalie walks into his living room - which is bizarre enough, since he let her go two weeks ago, after realising he was no longer going to need an assistant - flanked by Agent Coulson and a tall, pirate-eyed black man he's never met before. It only goes from weird to weirder when it turns out Natalie's real name is Natasha and that she's been working for SHIELD this whole time. Or, well, maybe it's not so weird. Maybe it does make sense that the über assistant has been a double agent all along.

They inject him with a little something that'll slow the poisoning down. He wishes they'd told him what it was  _before_ injecting it. He would've told them not to bother. No matter how many speeches Fury gives him about his father, it goes in one ear and out the other. His days are numbered, he's living in this house alone, and he has only one year of good deeds to show of his life. What good would it do to save him?

 

*

 

Pepper turns up on his doorstep on his birthday. She's out of her office clothes. Instead she's wearing a loose pair of black shorts paired with a light grey tank top. He stares at her collarbones as she lets herself in the front door, her hair loose of its usual ponytail and falling around her shoulders. She wheels a suitcase in behind her and marches up in front of him. He's still digesting the amount of leg she has on show. It's more than he got to see when they slept together. She'd been fluid movements in shadows. There'd been nothing for him to see. As though the dark kept what they were doing hidden. Like it didn't reveal how she felt.

"You cancelled your birthday party."

"I thought a quiet night in would do me good."

Pepper stares. "I'm moving in."

"Isn't that something you need to consult me about first?"

"Somebody's gotta make sure you're eating."

And so, she moves in.

 

*

 

That first night he doesn't get a wink of sleep. He's hyperaware the entire time that she's staying in the guest room across the hall. Any time he hears the faintest noise in the house, he loses himself in daydreams that it's her. That she'll open the door and slip into the bed with him one more time. He'd known that if he touched her, it'd set him off on an addictive pattern. The  _more, more, more_ of adrenaline may have stopped, yes. But now he wants more  _her._ More Pepper. The wish doesn't come true, though. The noises are just the house sighing, settling down to sleep, and when the sun rises he's still alone. He finds himself wondering what side of the bed she sleeps on. 

 

*

 

The first week they live together, a lot of his questions about Pepper are answered. He learns that she likes cream cheese on her bagels, that she refuses to eat them without having been toasted, and that she always has a slice of lemon in her morning tea. She makes a smoothie to take to work with her that is comprised mainly of apricots, bananas and cherries, but he's seen her sprinkle in blackberries a couple times. Contrary to what he'd expected, she doesn't do yoga before work. She does it once she gets home, on the balcony, winding down. He can see the way the tension from a day's work slips from her spine as she contorts her body into different poses. She always goes to bed at precisely ten o'clock, which amazes him, considering the amount of times he'd call her out to his house in the middle of the night during his younger years because he needed her to fix his mess. She only takes a bath on the weekends, and she showers every day, and when her hair is wet there's a slight curl running through it.

It answers a lot of his questions. His brain continues to produce more. He wants to know  _everything_ about her. Some of the information comes to him through his own mistakes. Like when he suggests she use strawberries for her smoothie and she tells him that she's allergic. Or when he tells her that he she should try anything other than cream cheese on her morning bagels, she reminds him that she has to get to work at exactly seven o'clock and no later, meaning she has no time to make anything more substantial unless she wakes before six. By the time the second week begins, he's mastered most breakfast food via some very intense cooking lessons from JARVIS, and he greets her on the Monday morning with a whole arrangement of breakfast food for her to choose from. Pepper shoves a piece of bacon into his mouth to stop his smug grin when she eats so much she can't button her shirt over her bloated stomach. 

They carefully don't touch, and he doesn't try to initiate anything. If this is all he gets in his last few months, he thinks it must be enough.

 

*

 

Natalie - _Natasha_ \- walks in one evening when they're fighting over the last of the olive garden breadsticks she'd brought home with her. Pepper releases the food and Tony flops back from the couch with the momentum. There's a frostiness to Pepper when he next looks at her. She glances between the two of them and wipes the crumbs from her lap as Natasha crosses the room, revealing the familiar injection. When he once would've protested, having already given up, he's ready for it this time. To be granted a couple hours, maybe even a few extra days, for evenings like this spent with Pepper. 

Pepper stands. "I'll leave you two alone."

"You'll want to see this," Natasha replies, and Tony doesn't exactly understand what it is the two communicate without saying anything, but Pepper sits back down.

The injection is sharp, but he feels the way his muscles loosen after. He shoves the rest of the breadstick in his mouth and eats happily. Natasha pockets the device, dressed down instead of in her agent uniform, and spins on her feet. 

"See you in a week, Mr Stark."

"Hold on," Pepper stands again. Natasha stops. "What is that? What did you do? His veins just..." 

Natasha tilts her head to the side. "Huh. I guess he can keep his mouth shut."

"She's a double agent," Tony supplies, wiping the crumbs from around his mouth. Natasha rolls her eyes. "What? You are. Very convincing, too. I'm still not entirely sure that you're a real person. Could be a robot for all I know."

Pepper's glancing between them curiously. "I don't - did you  _cure_ him?"

She sits beside him again and her fingers touch the spot on his neck where the poison has been zig zagging for weeks now. He almost chokes on the breadstick he's eating. Surely, he thinks, she must be able to feel his pulse under her hands. How it doubles when she's near him. Quadruples when she touches him. She'd left him with a bruise right where she's touching him, he remembers. For days he'd stared at it in the mirror, the proof of what they'd done together. That just because she'd run from it doesn't mean it hadn't happened. 

"No," Natasha replies quietly. "It just buys him time."

Pepper's hand drops from his neck then. He watches the way the light in her eyes dissipates. 

 

*

 

He does a lot of thinking about last words. When Pepper leaves for work, he wonders if she's prepared to be the one to find him, after it happens. No one else has access to him like she does. One morning she will leave him for work and come home to find him dead. At least it's not someone who expects more from him. Someone who only views him as Iron Man. He's pretty certain, actually, that she's seen him worse than dead. After all, she'd been working for him for so long. She'd been the one to find him after he'd come down from his high, after cocaine had stopped making everything glitter and he'd thrown up over legs. She'd been the one who'd have his sheets sent to be washed after he got home from a battle and bled all over the bed. Nowadays, he's not actually sure why she ever stuck around in the first place. He's always paid her more than enough, but what could be worth seeing your boss get in that kind of state night after night? Worth being the one to find him dead?

He could say something cliché, of course. Foolishly, he thinks he could tell her he loves her, but that wouldn't change things. It wouldn't change the fact he's dying and that he's never deserved her, not really. Maybe he won't even realise they're his last words. They might something stupid. Another joke falling easily out of his mouth. A goodbye in the morning as she's heading out the door and he's arguing with JARVIS about a new suit design he'll never wear. Maybe that would make things easier. Planning it all, having knowledge of his death and watching his body deteriorate slowly, has had more of a toll than he'd thought it would. It's hard to be so cavalier about it now. So maybe not knowing. Maybe seeing what happens. Maybe that would be a pleasant surprise. His last surprise, of course. A surprise nonetheless.

 

*

 

Pepper arrives home with all of the stuff he'd left in the office. Happy helps her bring it in. Tony even gets out the suit for the heavy lifting. If Happy has a word to say about their living arrangement, he keeps it to himself, and leaves without disturbing them further. Tony shoves all of it with the stuff Fury had given him - his father's things, which he has no intention of touching - and Pepper follows him down to the workshop to scream herself hoarse about him using the suit and accelerating the poisoning. He watches her go back up the stairs, heels clicking loudly against the floor, and wonders why it is they were always going to miss each other. Like parallel lines. Never destined to meet.

 

*

 

Rhodey visits. Unannounced. Because neither of them had been expecting him, they had no cover for what the hell Pepper was doing there on a Saturday morning eating toast at his kitchen counter while he rambled about how many possible cosmos there were. Pepper is quick to set him on the right track when he implies something dirty. And it shouldn't hurt, but it does, because they could've been something, even if was destined to ruin it. They would've burned bigger and brighter than any sun recorded and their inevitable ending would've been magnificent.

After Rhodey is gone, after Tony has spent hours pretending he is healthy and fine and quiet because there's no Iron Man business to do, he retires to his bedroom. He crawls under the sheets and allows himself to wallow. Because this is real. It's getting closer. Every day, every interaction, is closer to a last day. A last moment. He finds himself falling asleep and has nightmares where eels are winding around under his skin.

Something wakes him in the night. He barely remembers the weight shifting on the mattress or the lighting of the room changing, but then he feels a body lay against his, and he closes his arms around Pepper tightly. In a time full of lasts, this is a first, and he sleeps peacefully for the first time in months.

 

*

 

One night, he calls her into the workshop. 

The new suit stands in all its glory. Gold and orange. She raises her eyebrows. 

"You can't even use it, Tony," she tells him, crossing her arms over her chest.

"It's not for me."

She already knows what he's getting at. He can tell. Watches the way the cogs turn in her head and understanding floods her eyes. She asks anyway.

"Then who's it for?"

"You."

Pepper sighs. "Tony - "

"Just hear me out, okay?" He practically begs. "I know I've handled this all wrong. That's on me. But I've not got a lot of time, and I'm not going to be around to keep things safe, and I'm not saying you should. You just keep being you. But I need to know that you're - " He stops. They're in dangerous territory here. He's at risk of saying everything he plans on keeping hidden. The sort of words that almost tumble out of him when she curls up beside him in bed at night. "I just want to make sure you're safe. When I'm not around."

She turns on her heel and leaves the workshop. He stays down there for the rest of the night, giving her space, polishing the armour and double checking with JARVIS that only Pepper has access to the suit. It's the most advanced one he's ever built. He could add the modifications to his own, of course, but what's the use? His safety has been compromised. This is all he knows. This is all he can give her. He only knows how to bend mental into something that looks like love. Into safety. Pepper needs someone who works with softer and richer materials, he knows. But this is his best work. 

Pepper returns a few hours later. He's sitting at the desk, listening to music, mind drifting to places it shouldn't. Her eyes are red and her cheeks are blotchy. She murmurs  _thank you_ and he knows, somehow, she will be okay when he's gone.

 

*

 

Fury kicks his ass. That is to say, Natalie reports that he hasn't even opened his father's things, and Fury sends Coulson to monitor him. Pepper startles when she finds the agent standing in their living room, holding a pile of spare Iron Man parts, while Tony holds a slice of pizza in each hand and lectures Coulson that working makes him hungry. They adapt to having him around however. Pepper doesn't visit his room again that night, even though the agent leaves them after five o'clock, and she doesn't do it again the night after, as though she's worried about it getting out. On the third night, he finds himself standing outside of her room. The dark blue lighting sneaks out through a crack under the door. He walks away and down to his workshop. He falls asleep studying his father's expo diorama and Pepper wakes him with a hand on his shoulder the next morning, Coulson right behind her. 

She's not there when he creates the new element. Neither is Coulson. The man gets a phone call from the boss and leaves for New Mexico. He's alone, his father's words ringing in his ears - _my greatest creation is you_ - even if they don't feel true. The blue circles around him and he spins on his chair, laughing, a little manic because - holy shit. He did it.  _He's a genius._

He plans to tell Pepper when she gets home. So that they can discuss this face-to-face. So that the can see her reaction in real time. So that he can hold her, because he needs to, because it still doesn't feel real that he's going to survive after so long of resigning himself to his death. Then the call from Vanko comes through and the dinner he's cooking is left to burn.

 

*

 

Tony deposits her on the roof after it's all over. After Vanko is dead, and the suits are neutralised, and he's done the right thing and  _saved_ her. She still pushes him away, and when he pulls the helmet off she's screaming at him.

"Are you out of your mind?" She yells. 

"That's debatable." 

Even though he's in the suit, she pushes his shoulders and he stumbles back slightly. 

"You're going to kill yourself!" She slams her hand against the arc reactor in the suit. "How could you?"

"What, was I just supposed to let everyone else die?" He argues back.

"Uh, guys?"

They turn, and find Rhodey sitting on an air vent, still in his suit. The argument is postponed, not over, he can tell by the look of fury in Pepper's eyes. Rhodey glances between them awkwardly before launching into his spiel about why he should keep the suit, and that he had no idea Hammer and Vanko were working together. Tony half-listens, unbothered when Rhodey flies away in the suit, his eyes on Pepper through the whole thing.

 

*

 

They take a car back to the mansion, once the expo has been cleared up, and the sun is beginning to rise. Tony shoves his ruined suit in the trunk, shifting the arms and legs awkwardly to make it fit, and endures frosty silence with Pepper in the backseat. Happy watches them in the rearview mirror but he's not ready for this conversation in front of him, despite the fact it would get him out of trouble a lot quicker. He needs to be alone with her. For her genuine reaction. He needs to confess things because relief makes him brave. So he waits until they're parked up, until he's pulling the suit out of the trunk, until Happy's driven away to turn and talk to her. She's already stalked into the house. He drops the suit on the ground and follows after her. 

JARVIS informs him that he switched the oven off at precisely seven twenty-six, which is when the dinner had begun to burn. It explains the smoke stench in the house. He has the AI turn the ventilation on and calls for Pepper. JARVIS promptly informs him that she had entered her room and asked not to be interrupted. Tony ignores him and takes the stairs two at a time, the new arc reactor giving him a fresh burst of energy even after a battle, and bursts through her door without knocking. This is how he finds her packing. Suitcase on her bed, shoving clothes in without folding them, her face red with anger. Every drawer in the room is open, the closet doors too, and she even reaches into her hamper for her laundry. He finds himself staring for a moment before he can find his words.

"What are you doing?"

"I can't do this anymore." 

"Do  _what?_ "

"This!" She cries, waving a hand in the air. He's not sure what it's meant to mean. "Everything. I quit. I resign. You need to find someone else to be CEO."

"Now wait a minute - "

"No!  _You_ wait a minute!" She propels her flat irons across the room and into her suitcase. "I am  _tired,_ Tony. I thought I could do this. I thought I could move in here and be here for you and watch you  _die_ but I'm not strong enough, okay? I admit it. I'm not Wonder Woman. I can't do it. I can't - I can't let you give me a suit and make me breakfast and act like it's fine. I can't watch you fly around in that damn armour knowing that it's killing you." 

"I'm not dying, actually."

Pepper drops the t-shirt she's holding to the floor.

"Yeah. As of about four hours ago, I created a new element, one that won't kill me. So I'm all good."

He crosses the room slowly and bends to pick up the t-shirt she'd dropped. He folds it carefully, the way his mother used to handle his father's shirts, before setting it atop the pile she's made in the suitcase. Tony finds himself smiling a little wryly. He had always known he'd mess this up, them, even if there hasn't really been a  _them_ at all, just one night and no words in the dark. When he had admitted that he loved Pepper Potts to himself, in that tiny cave in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan, he had known he would love her forever and that would mean ruining everything. 

"Are you serious?" She asks breathlessly. He looks up to see tears spilling down her cheeks. "You really did it?"

"Yeah," he returns quietly. He catches her hand, because this whole being alive thing is making him feel pretty brave. Or, she does. Maybe both are true. "You can't get rid of me that easily, Potts."

Her arms are around him in an instant. She buries her forehead in the crook of his neck and squeezes him. Tony feels the breath knocked out of him, but he grips her back with the same ferocity, so much so that her feet lift a couple inches off the ground. When he sets her back down, he presses a kiss to the top of her hair, and she pulls away slightly to look at him with those blue eyes that always make him weak at the knees.

"If you still want to go, Pep, that's okay. But make sure it's for the right reasons."

"You still want me to be CEO? Even though you're not dying?"

"You're doing a damn better job of it than I ever did," he says honestly. "I just - want you around."

And that's the simple truth of it, really. That's all he's wanted for months now. 

Pepper's expression softens slightly. Her hands play with the hair at the nape of his neck and it sends a tingling sensation down his spine.

"That's all you want?" She asks softly.

"Whatever part of your life I can have," he says carefully, "is what I'll take." 

She tilts her head. 

"I thought..." She pauses and chews on her lower lip. "You've always been so direct with women, Tony. I can't figure _this_ you out."

He settles his hands on her hips. That's half the problem, isn't it, that he's constantly trying to be a different person for her? Not that he regrets changing. Now he knows how to be gentle, how to handle finer materials, instead of forging iron into weapons. Now he knows how to speak soft, how to let his emotions spill out into his expression, how to let his guard down around her instead of categorising all the ways she will leave. He's been expecting her to keep up. To read between the lines. To see that he's been changing  _for_ her, to treat her the way she should be treated. How could he have expected her to keep up, when he's been changing increment by increment, softly and quietly, as he intends to love her.

"Then I'll be direct," he tells her, and his hands mould around her waist, shaping, "I want you to stay. I want you to live in this house and stay with me. Not because I'm dying, but because you're all I could think about when I was captive in Afghanistan. And I want you, not just once, and not out of desperation, but always. If you'll have me." 

The sunrise is beginning to creep in through the windows. The amber light spills across her lips when they turn up into a smile.

"Well. I suppose someone has to put up with you," she says softly, and then she pulls him in for a kiss.

This time, she doesn't touch the arc reactor. The daylight spills across her skin and he remembers everything about her, like the scar she has on her abdomen from appendicitis, the coffee-coloured mole on her right hipbone, the sound of her laughter as she winds her hands through his hair. He allows himself time to make mistakes, doesn't try to impress her in desperation, to convince her not to leave. He moulds his body to hers and feels her press her smile against his neck. Her fingers run a straight line down his spine. The fear of death is very far away. 

He allows himself to live.

**Author's Note:**

> "I ramble. You have the heart of a gardener, and because of this you think of consequence, and your current path pains you. I am not wise, and I do not give advice, but I have come to know a few things. Sometimes breaking is making. Even iron can start again, and there are many things that move through fire and find themselves much better for it afterward."
> 
> \- Kerrek's Letter to Keyleth, Critical Role C1E69. Read the whole letter [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/criticalrole/comments/5588no/spoilers_e69_transcript_of_a_letter).


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